Web Safe colors

You may confidently forget about the Web/Brower safe color palette. First a little history way back in say 1995 most computer systems had 8-bit color systems. This meant that at most they could show 256 different colors at the same time. If you wanted different color there was a cheat called dithering. (putting two different colors together to make it look like you had the 3rd color) What it really did was make everything look grainy so it wasn’t that good of a good solution.

Then came the final solution the “Web Safe Colors”. It was a grand total of 216 that didn’t dither and looked the same on PCs and Macs. Of course the problem is that 216 colors isn’t that many, the human eye can detect the differences in million of colors. The bigger problem was that while most computers had 8-bit color some could show the full spectrum just fine. Never mind that, web safe became the standard, it worked its way into every graphics program or book every written.

Fast forward to 2005 and people are still afraid to use anything but web safe colors. Why? Nearly every computer in operation can show millions of colors, even PDAs and Cell phone generally can show thousands of colors. Of course you can still use these colors if you want to. If you don’t have a lot of color picking confidence switch over to web safe pick some of the major colors you are going to use and go from there.